1) Right. I'm using state in absence of a better term for "national" (royal, usually) level power. And while yes, royal power could do it, it usually didn't - either lack of interest or lack of ability or both.You forgot three things there
-What you call a state in Europe can be really messy if you look at the actual power : feudal principalities instead of kingdoms. But even with that, I would quote the failed Commune of Laon as an exemple on how the royal power could put an end to merchant's ambitions.
-The struggles between merchants that tend to limit bourgeois powers, by giving ideological weapons to their opponent, or by going to war themselves
-The bourgeois tended to be integrated into feudal elite in 5 generations : you had a relativly chaotic merchant class, when it was more stable in China in this regard.
2) Limit, but not eliminate.
3) There's that, but that might actually be a good thing in some ways.
Titus_Pullo said:Lastly, you seem to disagree with the fact that there was a surplus of labor in China at the period in question, because they were all too busy cultivating rice. Unless I'm mistaken, from which source are you basing this assumption on, when sources I've read say just the oposite?
"The heavy application of manpower and fertilizer to small plots of land has also had its social repercussions, for it sets up a vicious interdependence between dense population and intensive use of the soil whereby each makes the other possible. A dense population provides both the incentive of for intensive land use and the menas. Once established,t his economy acquired intertial momentum - it kept on going. The back breaking labor of many hands became the accepted norm, and inventive efforts at labor saving became the exception. . . . " (page 16)
"Rice was able to supply more calories per unit of land than any other crop, making it the staff of life in China from Song times onward. Btu it is indeed labor intensive.
Consider, for example, the extra labor required toadd another terrace on top of several already in use - the physical effort in climbing the terraces to prepare teh new top field, to bring up seedlings for transplatnting, to adjust the flow of irrigation, to carry up and apply fertilizer, to monitor, weed, and finally hand-harvest the crop. Kang Chao (1986) estimates that in China's labor-intensive farming system, labor imput into a unit of land may be 10 to 20 times the labor input usual in extensive plow cultivation elsewhere." (page 170-171)
China: A New History (Second Enlarged Edition)
Where, then, is the surplus labor not tied to the land to maximize the output of rice coming from? Diminishing returns are still returns.
Which book are you quoting, by the way?
I don't know about anyone else, but to me, the problem has far less to do with religion being more or less favorable and far more about the stronger influence of the anti-commercial attitudes. The Church in Europe was far less able to influence the marketplace than the Confucian bureaucracy was in China. Not less inclined, but less able.The same bias existed in Europe in the Middle Ages over land owning over commerce. That's why I don't agree with the religion theory as hampering Chinese progress when equally anti-progressive sentiments can be made of Judeo-Christian tradition. I was simply stating another more practical reason why merchants were despised in China.
There's also a decent discussion on how the economic factors in place in China render things just plain impractical (in the book I quoted), but it goes back to the need to squeeze every drop of productivity out of land area, and the farmer not being able do much beyond a pretty minimal subsistence.
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